Amazon UK Release Seller Ratings – You’re Being Scored

Amazon UK is rolling out a new “Seller Ratings” that scores you bonus points for being good and slaps you hard for being bad.

At the time of writing, I’ve not seen this published elsewhere. I’ve also given the link to the dashboard to numerous people and it appears this is on a controlled roll out. It may not be in your Amazon Seller Central account yet, but it’s coming.

Update: This will be live in all accounts in approximately two weeks from today (26th Sept 2012).

Amazon Seller Ratings - Header I have always suspected that Amazon would have such a system in place similar to this, well it’s not hard to guess what else would power the buy box percentages? And now we can see the evidence that this is the case.

In this article I’ll be looking at the new Amazon Seller Ratings Dashboard, the details behind it and as a bonus, included are the Amazon videos on the new Seller Ratings and also I’ve transcribed them for you.

You can let me know your thoughts on how we’re being rated in the comments section at the bottom, but for now, lets dig in and see what this fuss is about.

Seller Ratings Widget

What Amazon have done is make their scoring system transparent and in the process revealed a few nice extras and cool interface to boot. You can track where you are succeeding and also where you need to focus upon. Amazon Seller Ratings Dashboard Widget If you have this enabled you’ll know. There is a whopping great big pop-up message that appears on the Amazon dashboard after signing in. You’re given a rating and on a sliding scale of Fair to Excellent and in this example we can see this account is “Very Good”.

Note that this rating is appearing above the standard “Account Health” that you find in a normal Amazon Seller Central account, I am assuming this is because this is going to become the new standard for sellers to keep an eye upon.

An Introduction to Amazon Seller Ratings

This is the first video that is being used to inform Amazon Seller Central users about the new “Seller Ratings” and I’ve included the transcription under the video.

Press Play

This is the transcription of the video above and I’ve put the key parts in bold.

On Amazon, buyers have a lot of choices. So, when they are ready to purchase, what makes you stand out? Customers tell us that a sellers rating plays a critical part in their buying decision.

Would it not be great then if there is a rating system that could accurately reflect the effort you put in to making customers happy? Better still, what if the system could help you pin point customer service improvements that will lead directly to better rating and happier buyers?

Introducing Amazon seller rating inspired by and built for sellers. This unbiased, data driven system automatically recognizes your performance on every order. So now, every order counts towards and excellent, very good, good, or fair rating. This rating is based on how quickly you respond to buyers and whether you ship on time, cancel orders, have credit card charge backs, A to Z guarantee claims or negative feedback.

With this new seller rating system, buyers can get a complete picture of who they are trusting with their purchase and you can reap the rewards of all your hard work.
Seller ratings is not just comprehensive and objective; it also gives you more control. The seller matrix clearly points you to areas of improvement. Concentrate your rating on those and watch your rating and customer satisfaction rise. Simple as that!

While we are very excited to release this new system to sellers, we have no immediate plans to make the ratings visible to buyers. This is because we really want your input first before we consider making it visible to buyers.

We also want to give you time to get familiar with your rating, understand how it is calculated and to make improvements.
At Amazon, we know how important building business is to you and we know how important happy customers are to your business. We are excited to introduce this new seller rating system that can help with both.

To check out your rating and learn more, go to the seller rating page or click on the performance tab on seller central.

Seller Ratings Dashboard

To go with this new seller ratings, there is a new dashboard that is easy to understand. Although I have a suspicion that we’ll see this page evolve over time and likely see what we have on the Account health tab (the standard tab for monitoring performance on Amazon) join together into a single tab.

This dashboard is broken down into four key sections and before I walk you through them, it should be noted that all values shown in these images have been edited and may not add up correctly.

My Rating

Amazon Seller Ratiings - Ratings Table Amazon Seller Ratings - Ratings Table FlyoverThis block shows how you’re fairing and where you sit on the scale of “Fair” to “Excellent”. I didn’t notice this until later, but each of these ratings has a score assigned:

  • Fair = 0 to 0.79
  • Good = 0.8 to 0.93
  • Very Good = 0.94-0.97
  • Excellent = 0.98 to 1

We’ll be looking at these ratings in the next section, but for now realise that you’re being rated on a scale of 0 to 1 and you are being expected to perform in the top 0.3 percentile. Well, just like eBay :)

Score

There is a video on the rating system for which we’ll get to shortly, but for now we can see from the dashboard to the below that we (as sellers) are going to be given points. Seller Rating Score DashboardThese points are broken up into 4 sections and there is a bonus too.

  • No problems = 1 point
  • Minor Problems = 0 points
  • Moderate problems = -1 points
  • Severe problems = -5 points

order score +1+1 No problems
If you have no issues with the order being processed and the customer receiving it ok etc… Then happy days we get a point, sweet!

order score 00 Points for Minor Problems
But if you fail to answer an email within 24 hours, you wipe out the point you would have got for an order despatched on time and with no issues. The same goes if the order is late to be despatched.

order score -1-1 Points
If you have to cancel the order, then I’m afraid this is where it starts to hurt, you receive a negative point for a cancelled order.

order score -5– 5 Points for Being Bad
Let’s face it the following four reasons are all bad and Amazon are going to slap you for a 5 points if you achieve any of these. Receiving a charge-back, an A-Z claim, a negative feedback or allowing an order to expire are all not nice to experience as a buyer, let a lone as a seller.

While I’m writing this I am reminded of a Ted.com video I watched a few weeks back. While I’m not going to include it here as part of the article (as it’s worthy of its very own), the dynamics being used in this system absolutely wreak gaming. The video which I’m taking about is here and it’s 10 minutes well spent.

order score +1-10.1 Points as a Bonus
If you get everything right then you’ll be awarded a 10% bonus, well 0.1 of a point for fulfilling your part of the process well, by including a valid tracking number, met the minimum proposed delivery date, had no refund and were delivered within 3 working days. Amazon Seller Ratings - Time Weighted AverageAssuming that most businesses include these details anyway, this could be an easy win.

But it gets better, Amazon has also included a special note to a time weighted average. Something that we all know from eBay with Best Match and the value of recent sales.

Amazon’s calculation favours order history in the past 90 days but still keeps note of your past experience.

We’ll be looking0 at the points system next in a video from Amazon.

How are these Seller Ratings Calculated Video

Amazon’s gone the full hog with this and we’ve got a second video for the seller ratings. Again a full transcription of the video is included with the key points highlighted in bold.

Press Play

Video Transcription

At Amazon we know your rating is important to you and that it helps you build your business. So we want to help you understand how objective data is used to calculate your rating and how by focusing on specific improvement areas, you have the power to change it.

Here is how it works:

Every order is assigned a score. If an order is fulfilled without any problems, it gets one point. On the other hand, orders that have problems loose points.

These include orders that were canceled or expired, shipped late, had increased from buyers that took longer than 2 hours to respond to, had credit card charge backs, A to Z guarantee claims or negative feedback.

Some problems are more serious than others. So, for example, an order gets zero points if it’s shipped late but gets negative five points if it receives an A to Z guarantee claim. If an order has multiple problems, only the most serious one is counted.

You can also get bonus points. An order with truly exceptional service is awarded with an additional bonus of a 10th of a point for a total score of 1.1. Next, the score for all your orders within the last 12 months are totaled and an average is computed by dividing the total points by the number of orders.

Since performance on recent orders is more recent than those in the past, a time weighted average is applied to determine your final score.

Finally, depending on where your final score lies within the pre-determined range, you will be rated as a one of excellent, very good, good or fair. You can identify problem areas and then improve your rating by looking at the order quality report or by focusing on the suggestions on the seller rating page.

Some of you may discover that you do not have a rating. That just means you are a new seller or you have not had enough orders this year to calculate a rating. As your business grows and you have sufficient order history, the system will automatically calculate a rating for you. Meanwhile, you can still view your rating metrics to see how you are doing.

At Amazon, we are excited about a comprehensive and objective rating system that rewards you for all the effort you put in to your business and puts you in the driver seat.

How can I Improve My Rating

How can I improve my ratings This section shows the number of negative feedback, number of seller cancellations and late despatches, that in itself is useful, but what is sat behind this is even cooler and we’ll be looking at the new reporting tools in more depth shortly. Each of the suggestions, link to the same help page on Amazon here, but this may not work for you yet!

Rating Trend

Amazon Seller Ratings - Rating Trends ChartDecidedly un-remarkable currently, this chart over time will track your performance so you can see where your account is going. It gets better… honest.

New Reporting!

Amazon Seller Ratings - Report FilteringTransparency has been a big issues for sellers on eBay, especially for DSR ratings. Some sellers get reports and some do not. Finding out who has left you poor ratings is ni-on impossible for the masses and this is where Amazon have done really well. Their reporting for this new section is amazing.

Well… that is if you spot the hidden side menu that allows you to filter the search results. But that is a tiny niggle. That side bar that says “Search & Filters” is not clear that it exist when you first load the page and I only spotted it by accident.

On opening you can see in the screen shot, there are numerous search filters and also a date range filter that I’ve not included in the screen shot too. But thats just the filters, you wait till you see the report below!

The screen shot below shows an edited version of a orders report.
I’ve put a huge TICK next to the tick box you want to click on as again this is a hidden feature that shows all the good stuff in the report.
Seller Ratings Order Report ExampleIn the report above I have used a couple of colours to indicated the different scores in action. For orders where there has been a screw up, then -5 points have been applied, there are a few -1’s and a few 0’s as well.

What is shown is that there are two 1.1 transactions and while this report gives a good overview of the scores in action, the filters used were to show the the zero and negative values and the vast majority of your account should be +1 and +1.1’s.

Amazon Seller Ratings Summary

Technically we already get the stats for the products rankings on Amazon through the seller reports and sales rank scores. Amazon have now made the variables that they see as important to buyers, ensuring that the customer is happy is now rewarded.

But when the customer is not kept happy, then they’ll slap you & take points away from you. No one likes anything being removed, taken away or deducted and if they play the gaming dynamics on this well, this should see some interesting results given enough time.

Talking of gaming dynamics, here is one for Mr Bezos, making the seller stats public, as much as they’d hate you for it (I’m sure a few of you just gasped at that), would make a massive game that pitches product based businesses against each other on a open(ish) playing field other than just the price race to the bottom.

The video content included by Amazon is excellent and in the video for the how the ratings are calculated, it’s mentioned that the ratings are not going to be shown to the buyers just yet.

I’m not sure that 0.98 really means a lot to buyers. The general public understands percentages a lot more easily and my biggest comment to Amazon is to that convert this number to a percentage and show that to a buyer instead. 0.98 means what exactly? “Is that not even 1 out of a hundred?” You see my point?

Along with keeping it clear to buyers, Amazon has so far kept a clean interface, but even while I believe that the have included is very cool, looks fab and it’s been explained well, I do have my reservations that this may confuse business owners, especially new businesses to Amazon with new seller ratings, if they’re not combined with the existing options quickly.

What do you think?

Do you like the idea of a points mechanism, where you are rewarded for good behaviour and slapped for being bad? Do you think this is a good idea or a bad idea?

Let me know in the comments box below.

35 replies
  1. theemporiumdirect
    theemporiumdirect says:

    Hi Usman,

    I hope this helps you:

    To see how the carriers should be input, go to your “Manage Orders” screen and click “Confirm Shipment.” (Don’t worry, you will be cancelling before actually confirming)

    From here, click the drop down “Carrier” menu under “Delivery Method.”

    This will show you the list of our supported carriers and how they should be entered into the feed files, i.e. Royal Mail = Royal Mail and DPD = DPD.

    Best regards,

    Reply
  2. Usman
    Usman says:

    Hi,

    Has anyone had a problem that no orders are getting bonus points? We use DPD and Royal Mail, and mark items as dispatched via eSellerPro but not a single order has received bonus points. Often we receive orders at 5pm and customers receive the item the next day.

    I have raised this with Amazon and they keep saying both DPD and Royal Mail are not supported.

    Regards,

    Usman

    Reply
    • Matthew Ogborne
      Matthew Ogborne says:

      Howdy Usman,

      eSellerPro is the issue there, for some reason the tracking info is not being picked back up by Amazon and thus you’re not getting the bonus points. Raise it as ticket or speak to your account manager as the last I heard it was in beta testing a few weeks back so that merchants could get the bonus points from Amazon.

      Matt

      Reply
      • Usman Riaz
        Usman Riaz says:

        Thanks Matt.

        I will raise that ticket right now, hopefully they can fix it soon. When I go on Amazon I can see eSP has added tracking though.

        Regards,
        Usman

    • theemporiumdirect
      theemporiumdirect says:

      Hi Usman,

      I know where you are coming from and I have raised this with Amazon and ESP. I believe Amazon do accept Royal Mail but you got to make sure the feed is correct which is sent from ESP.

      1. Amazon currently do not support all tracking details from all couriers, e.g. we use RM and PF and they only support RM and NOT PF.

      They say they are working on integrating with all major couriers.

      2. ESP have to provided the tracking and shipment feed exactly as Amazon require, e.g. for our PF shipments ESP send the data file as Parcel Force whereas Amazon require it to be Parcelforce.

      I have raised this with ESP and I have provided them with the list of all correct names as required by Amazon for their data file.

      As MO suggests, I would advise you to find the correct names Amazon require for your couriers i.e. DPD and then pressure ESP to ensure that what file they send is correct and acceptable as per the required data file.

      I would also ask Amazon to ensure they do support DPD.

      Best regards,

      Reply
      • Usman
        Usman says:

        Thanks for that information. Do you by any chance know what Amazon need Royal Mail to be named from eSP?

        I have been trying to get information from Amazon regarding both DPD and Royal Mail and have had no luck so far.

        Regards,

        Usman

  3. cashstretcher
    cashstretcher says:

    Hi Matt

    We Have suffered badly at the hands of the new rating setup, around a year ago we were transferring over from our manual system to eseller pro and as a consequence we experienced alot of cancelled orders, this has obviously effected our account and we are showing as only having a rating of 0.82. (which Amazon nicely puts us in the bottom 11% of sellers, abit like having to wear the dunce cap at school)
    We are obviously dedicated to increasing this rating, a few immediate things we have done to try increase this rating are;

    Request for false negative feedbacks to be removed, of which afew have and this has increased our score, and we are also following up any A to Z guarantee claims that we think shouldn’t be on there.

    We have increased the range of Small FBA items that we sell as loss leaders in order to boost our account rating (we are still not sure if the new Amazon rating takes into account FBA sales)

    My question I suppose, is, is there anything else apart from the obvious (don’t cancel orders and get back to customers in 24 hours) that we can do to try bump out score up quickly. and also do you know how much emphasis Amazon put on the last 90 days of trading figures?

    Thanks
    John

    Reply
    • Matthew Ogborne
      Matthew Ogborne says:

      Howdy John,

      I feel for you moving systems is never easy, although to add a positive spin, the only way is up from here :)

      If we focus on what you can do:

      • Tackle undesirable feedbacks
      • Follow up on those A-Z claims
      • Add tracking numbers if appropriate to score the bonus points
      • Use the reporting they provide

      The last one really rocks, as the reporting included in the seller ratings reporting area is excellent, you know exactly which orders you need to work on and also can look retrospectively to see why they received less than 1 point too.

      My question I suppose, is, is there anything else apart from the obvious (don’t cancel orders and get back to customers in 24 hours) that we can do to try bump out score up quickly. and also do you know how much emphasis Amazon put on the last 90 days of trading figures?

      If we look at the graph they show in the seller ratings area, the short answer is “a lot”.

      And they still carry half their weight at 90 days, again taking the positive side, at the 90 days point they are still holding 50% of their weight, so they’re important, but no to a degree that they can be counteracted by recent activities. In reality this is going to linger for quite a while, guessing that the events that caused this happened 8-10 months ago, you’re nearing the end of the crappy period and by Christmas you should be clear (sweet!).

      Does that help you?

      Mattdisabledupes{f18f47d3ad47aee674569dcc52e9b571}disabledupes

      Reply
    • Matthew Ogborne
      Matthew Ogborne says:

      Hi John,

      When it comes to FBA items, I don’t know for sure (not checked), but I’d strongly suggest that FBA orders are not included, Amazon is perfect afterall *coff* and don’t require the same reporting/recording as for externally fulfilled orders.

      By the way, when it comes to FBA, have a read of this thread in the Wholesale forums, interesting reading.

      Matt

      Reply
      • cashstretcher
        cashstretcher says:

        HI Matt

        Yes a great help, we will carry on working on the bits we can to try get upto some sort of respectable level.

        The thread is an interesting read. I have a very similar story, a year or so ago I was sat at an awards event on the same table as the MD of a large internet security company, we had been a customer of theirs for many years through normal traditional retail channels. about a week prior to this we decide to trail there antivirus product on Amazon at a low price just to see if anyone would buy a copy (we were back then just dabbling in the Amazon market). turns out that week before the dinner, Amazon had contacted the internet security company directly with an invoice for the difference in the cost they paid for their stock and also an invoice for the loss in sales for a cheaper market place listing existing for that product.
        Its no secret they use the marketplace to gain a more dominant place in the market. We dont see a great future working with Amazon…

        Thanks once again…

        P.S. just catching up through your podcasts, but there proving very helpful!

        Regards
        John

  4. proetus
    proetus says:

    This evening I had a really random conversation in the pub with some complete strangers infact so random I will never remember how we got to this subject lol

    To cut a long story short … This person is a long standing Amazon customer and appart from the odd winge never been let down

    She recently left somebody a nuetral feedback “Recived before expected well packed lovely item” When I asked why neutral she said very next day I realised I could have got it cheaper and she was genuinely horrified when i explained how that potentially damages small businesses

    Reply

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